Nineteen Clerihews

John Adams
Never visited houses managed by madams.
He remained faithful, without fail,
To Abigail.

Fred Astaire
Epitomized savoir-faire.
Onscreen he never did anything gauche,
Not even with Nina Foch.

Karl Benz
Viewed the world through an engineer's lens.
His vision, of course,
Was of a carriages without a horse.

Leonard Bernstein
Seldom showed a stern mien.
You could see for half a mile
His smile.

Ambrose Bierce
Wrote prose somewhat fierce.
Despite the fame of him,
No one knows whatever became of him.

Daniel Boone's kin
All wore caps made of coonskin.
Because shooting animals was Daniel's passion
He supplied the family's headwear fashion.

Alessandro Botticellii
Painted women large in buttocks and belly.
Seeing the ads in Vogue he would not find sexy
Models so very anorexy.

The Bronte girls--Charlotte, Emily, and Anne
Rarely gazed lustily at a man.
They reserved most of their leering looks
For books.

Paul Bryant
For years was on segregation reliant.
Beaten by USC, he saw the light
And fielded a team only partly white.

George Burns
Did not cultivate ferns.
He left gardening to his spacey
Wife Gracie.

Aaron Burr
In his lifetime created quite a stir.
What added to the fire of his fame some fuel
Was killing Hamilton in a duel.

Julius Caesar
Never became an old geezer.
Stabbed to death in his fifties he was heard to say,
"Et tu, Brute?"

Lewis Carroll
Wore the simplest of apparel.
Every High Street shop window in Oxford town
Reflected him in an Oxford gown.

Miguel de Cervantes
Often put on women's panties.
He did so not to be erotic,
Just quixotic.

Raymond Chandler
Of fictional facts was a creful handler.
He armed Philip Marlow
With a pistol, not a knife by Barlow.

Agatha Christie
Had a period in her life that remains misty.
She once disappeared from public view,
Leaving not a clue.

John Ciardi
Preferred grappa to Bacardi.
Always beneath his cark Italian eyes,
A word to the wise.

William Clark
Rode with Meriwether Lewis in a canoe of bark.
They alternated paddling, each in turn:
One in the bow, one in the stern.

Wendy Cope
Must have many times said, "Nope."
What else can we think when
Her most famous poems in titled "Bloody Men."

Some Older Stuff

A Prayer for Judas
"inter pontem et fontem..."
Judas, the coins flung away he'd been given for a kiss,
In despair went off and sought the suicide's abyss.

Around his neck sad Judas arranged a snake of rope
And stepped into the darkness of those devoid of hope.

I pray the God of Jesus allowed His Judas light
In that eternal instant before the noose jerked tight--

And pray such grace be granted to each of us at our end
Who still live on as traitors with silver yet to spend.


Birthday Prayer
September 1998
On the Psalmist's page it simply reads,
"Three score years and ten."
Of my life sixty years are past
And will not come again.

And so, perhaps, I've ten years left--
Only half a Scripture score--
Yet time enough, I say, by God,
To learn a little more.

But then I think in my old way,
What else have I to learn?
I know by now how near is death,,
How quick short candles burn.

Oh, Author of that Bible page,
If ten more years I live,
What knowledge known to You alone
Have I to fear you'll give?


Timepiece
Growing old my body grows thin.
My heavy watch on its metal links
Slips down around my slender wrist
And turns its darkened face from me.

With a shake I make it again
Upright on my lifted left hand.
The numbers properly in place,
I see how late I soon shall be.

.

Masterpiece Theater
Snobbish liberal friends of mine--
Over sandwiches made with watercress--
On Super Bowl Sunday night
Chose to tune in PBS.


Pop-Up Thought
Edison, Tesla, and Steinmetz--
Engineers whom I love the most.
Thanks to them I own an appliance
That makes me perfect toast.


Evanescence
The thick pages of old anthologies
Are heavily freighted and taxed
With poets writing of beauteous snow--
How eloquently have they waxed!

I have searched, but never came across
One single word of what those poets felt
In the following post-rapturous days
When with wet feet they watched the damned stuff melt.


The Old Formalist at the Library
Big thick books daunt me
As further into life I age.
Will I live to finish this?
I think, as I look at the number
On the far last page.


Redrafting
Faced with failure, "Back to the old drawing board"
Was once our rueful declaration.
Nowadays technology's progress requires
That we say, "Back to the old CAD station."


Assimilation
I know a native Southerner
Who's lived too long in New York.
So apostate has he become,
He eats fried chicken with a fork.

The Idea of Disorder 
at Coney Island
Wallace Stevens wrote his father
That the Atlantic Ocean was
"...dirty, wobbly, and wet."

All these many years later
I concur with his assessment:
It's all three of them yet.


Telephone
Where the receiver is received
Is called a cradle.

How often, after bad news,
Have you laid it down

As you might
A finally fallen asleep baby.


Parochially Schooled
Unlike others, I was as happy as
A Beatrix Potter rabbit,
Being taught by schoolmarm nuns,
Each with chalk dust on her habit.

From them I learned to read, to write,
And do math at its lowest range.
Now I can scratch out a grocery list
And verify my change.

Sisters, surely with God in Heaven
Whose love for me you also taught,
Pray for at least one former pupil
Remembering with grateful thought.


In Principio
When Willie Yeats was a little lad
Did he pee against Sligo trees?
Or play Gaelic football roughly
And scab his skinny knees?

Ah, no. He simply sat and listened
To Irish peasants and their tales
Which he later turned in London
Into grand poetic sales.

So when you see a spectacled boy
Being bookish, pale and wan,
Reflect: he might one day write some verse
As good as Leda's Swan.


Scribality
The world began to become connected,
To be faintly faultily linked
When the unseen thoughts of man and things
Came to be permanently inked.

Some Dickinson Stuff

An Alumna of the Mt. Holyoke
Female Seminary Meets a Townsman
--Boston Common 1853
I encountered a man from Amherst
And inquired, "How's dear Em?"
He lowered his eyes, gave a cough,
And started out, "Ahem..."

"Well, ma'am, it's a hard thing to report,
But we in the Town all fear
That Emily's going--" he touched his head--
"A little strange up here."

"Oh, no!" I cried, and then, "How so?
Whatever can you mean?
When I left, she was the sanest girl
The Town had ever seen!"

"Oh, that she was," the man agreed,
"But lately, I'm afraid,
She stays upstairs in her little room
Behind a pulled-down shade."

"What of it, sir?" I cried again,
"That doesn't make her mad!"
And then the Amherst man went on,
"Now brace yourself--it's bad--

The news that you have wrung from me--
I fear that it gets worse--"
Then he leaned and whispered in my ear,
"She's taken to writing Verse."

I staggered back in utter shock:
I knew it was the end--
Writing Verse is a certain sign
One's gone around the bend.

Oh, I wept all night for my sweet Em--
That angel bright and pure--
For having fallen victim to The Verse,
The Disease that has no Cure.

Electronic Emily
Out upon--the World
She gazed from--Upper Room
Recluse--and all in White
Her eye--a Camera Zoom

Not to mention--how
Her Ear--that Microphone
Picked up--from Miles off
The way--that Flowers groan

God made--in Amherst
The first--of VCR's
A faithful--Taper of
Light--from faroff Stars

In Amherst, Once...
A little girl was startled by a snake
Passing her foot in the grass.
This caused a constriction in her body,
A puckering of her ass.

She grew up to be a poet,
Writing all artfully alone,
And changed the true location
To an even truer bone.

Autre Temps, Autre Moeurs
Just as you might, for a treat,
Drive your kids down to the seashore
To enjoy the waves,

The Dickinsons would sometimes
Ride Emily out to the edge of town
To enjoy the graves.

Emily at the Plate
From its Mound--the World hurls
To wait at Home--takes Nerve
Many--can hit--the Fast Ball
But ah--so few--the Curve


Conversation
"Vesuvius dont talk--Etna--dont..."
--Emily Dickinson in a "Master" letter
"Okay, Em. We won't"
The mountains replied
And kept, mostly, like her,
Their lava inside.

Miss Lonelyhearts' Revenge
An obscure Miss E. Dickinson
Once wrote off for advice from
One of Boston's leading sages.

In Bartlett's book he owns one line
While she alone holds title to
Five double-columned pages.

Tabloid Retraction
"When Emily Dickinson praised poetry
that made her 'feel physically as if the top
of my head were taken off,' she was calling
for deeper endorphin payloads"
--Brad Leithhauser, "The Confinement of Free Verse"
Miss Dickinson, interviewed
While weeding her small hyphen-
ated garden on the lower slope
Of Mt. Parnassus, Massachusetts,
Denied ever using or even condoning the use
Of endorphins at any time or in any mode.

"Much less," she added, in her
Characteristic Upper Case voice,
"Would I ever, ever--Employ
So ugly a word as Pay-load."

Editorial Board Meeting
"[Houghton Mifflin] thought that Higginson
must be losing his mind to recommend such stuff
[the poems of Emily Dickinson].
Higginson has snapped. He's lost his mind.
This old maid's book will never sell.
We do not mean to be unkind,
But Higginson's snapped. He's lost his mind.
Her stuff is raw and unrefined--
As cracked as the Liberty Bell.
Yes, Higginson's snapped. He's lost his mind.
This old maid's book will never sell.

Amherst Power & Light
When I back up my verse on floppy disks,
As the hard drive is going around,
I think of Emily sewing up her poems
In little packets to be found.

How truly blest was she, dear Emily--
She of the artful, telling dash--
Never in all her life had she to fear
A computer's sudden crash.

Policy
"We do not publish poetry...."
--"Guidelines for Contributors"
The Emily Dickinson Journal
We do not publish poetry? That's true.
Prose is the medium we employ.
What Emily did, we do not do.
We do not publish poetry. It's true.
We have no space for verse that's new.
Our journal's a tool and not a toy.
We do not publish poetry? Quite true.
Prose is the medium we employ.

Ceremony at West Cemetery
Who bore Emily's body to her grave,
Soul already with the Lord?
Kelley and Moynihan and Sullivan,
Cashman, Scannell, and Ward.

The pallbearers, a bunch of Paddies
Who worked on her father's grounds,
Were of the Select Society
Who boxed her Out of Bounds.

Her feathery body, worn by beating
Against the Cage of God,
Rode the shoulders of six Irish Micks
To be covered with New Sod.

Famine-hardened, they did not weep
At the World's and Amherst's loss,
But, shovels down, I see them all
Making the Sign of the Cross.

Assimilation
I know a native Southerner
Who's lived too long in New York.
So apostate has he become,
He eats fried chicken with a fork.


At Second and Arch...
The Widow Ross had an upholstery shop
And there she sewed some flags,
Spangled with five-pointed stars
That she made from petticoat rags.

Historians deny she was the first
To make the banner with needled thread.
Despite all the debunking critics, though,
Betsy lives in the American head.

As the Italians say, "If it's not true,
It remains a well-made story,"
Better in fact than Captain Driver's
And the relic called Old Glory.


Brief Winter Storm, Atlanta
In the evening the snow descends.
The streets are hushed.
In the morning, the sun ascends.
The streets are slushed.


Clerihew: Astaire II
Fred Astaire
Epitomized savoir-faire.
Onscreen he never did anything gauche,
Not even with Nina Foch.


Fame
Some poets achieve success in this life.
Others must wait for Posterity's rewards.
Edgar Guest owned a Cadillac.
The rest?  Banged-up Fords.

Fifteen Quatrains

Schadenfreude
Face it--there's a dirty secret
That's common to us all:
We go to the circus hoping
The acrobats will fall.

Quod Erat Non Demonstrandum
Reading of man's immateriality
In a book by an Eastern sage
I licked spit upon my finger
Every time I turned a page.

Urban College of Art
How fortunate is the young artist
Who is in the city set:
To have all those subway posters
With no mustaches yet.

Troop Movements
War is less a matter
Of bold Homeric scenes
Than that of thousand and thousands
Of makeshift latrines.

Tuition
My first lesson in deception?
I learned it as a kid--
When a young girl said to me,
"Let's not and say we did."

Vocatio
Even in my small Latin
I know my true temper:
Aliquando vates,
Versificator semper.

The Old Fan
Perfection? Perfection?
What do I know of that?
Bob Gibson on the mound--
Ted Williams at the bat.

On Learning that Annette Funicello Has M.S.
Death, that dirty old guy
With the biggest and blackest of ears
Is all of a sudden doing his dance
Among the Mousketeers.

On Learning that Heaney Cleared a Cool Million
Too many people think poets are ethereal,
Unconcerned with the things of this earth.
When they told Yeats that he'd won the Nobel Prize,
His first words were, "How much is it worth?"

On the Source of Poetry
Tell me, do you ever think
How defensively act the squid?
Troubled, they throw up screens of ink
In the way that I just did.

On the Quatrain
Even in the confining space
Of a four-wheeled circus cage
The pacing impatient tiger
Can perfectly express his rage.

On the Indifference of Nature
Pine trees fall in Southern woods
To make paper of all kinds:
Some sheets will bear immortal poems
And others will wipe behinds.

On a Highbrow Poetry Reading
I didn't like his reading.
I didn't like it at all.
He read as though his jockey shorts
Were a size and a half too small.

A Thought for the 17th of March
It was for the Irish Church a thing of great luck
That Patrick, trying to put the Trinity over,
Did not bend down and happen to pluck
A piece of four-leaf clover.

Annual Occurrence
Now it is autumn and all over the civilized world
They are being trucked in, bound and smelling of
Clean and slickly coated paper, the calendars

Of the coming years, to all the stores where we buy time--
Book and office supply and drug, even some
Once known as stationery with an e and not an a.

The year-to-come comes with all its ordered squares
Properly numerated, month after month, day after day,
With or without sentimental four-color covering prints.

Their salmon-like arrival at the banks of time's river
Manifests once more the human hope of a future,
As filled with faith as paintings on the walls of caves,

Even though for some there lies within those leaves
One unmarked day when they will never again
Feel anymore the need to confirm any dates at all.


Denial
You urge me to look upon the table
At the spread-out cards of my losing hand.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

Yes, I clearly heard the words, "Be realistic."
I caught the tone of your stern command.
I turn my head and murmur Becket's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

I listened to you listing all the many ways
Things went ill, the bad results of all I planned.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's word:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

You tell me to face the unavoidable music
Like a Civil War soldier behind the band.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

While you are admonishing me, my imagination
Flees to some far place, let us say, Samarkand.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

Few are the patient people who can wait
For the clear day when others will understand
What Sam Beckett meant when he wrote the words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

<sup>Hyperbole
I keep high in my mind the cliff
That was my Everest when young
On whose face in boy-imagining
Between the earth and death I hung.

Whenever I return to where
Only funerals make me go,
I do not drive to where it stands
For fear it prove too low.

I fool my mind with my own past,
Exiled from childhood’s dreams,
Nor will I cease to swim across
The rivers I made of streams.</sup>


Locus Classicus
Think of the early humanists
Bent over in their privies
Reading the epics of Homer
Or some narrative of Livy’s.
 
Ignoring the cloacal smell
They preserved the classical mind
By letting their spirits soar above
That which they left behind.
 
Pity the students centuries down
Being force-fed Greek and Latin
Wishing the humanists had dropped
The texts in the place they sat in.


The Child is Father to the Man
“…’objective correlative’ which was,
I suppose was what they called a mask in St. Louis”                                                
                       --Seamus Heaney, “Feeling Into Words”
It was the afternoon of All Hallows’ Eve,
And Mrs. Eliot was supervising
Her six-year old son’s selection
Of the costume he would wear that night.
 
To her suggestions of pirate, hobo, or cowboy
He said with a stamp of his foot. “None
Is objectively correlative, Mother,
And thus none is exactly right.”



<sup>The Shropshire Lad: 1969
Back in a rubber body bag
Blacker than his black skin
Came Calvin of the Corner Poolroom
 And coke and grass and gin.

What to Calvin was Viet Nam,
Poor child of the city’s brick,
Who did not hear the sniper’s bolt
As it slid back with a snick?

Over his head the gunship choppers
Chopped out their deadly chuck,
But Death ran Calvin to the ground
Outside of Phan Van Vuc.

They laid him down in Arlington,
Gave his mother a folded flag.
His poolroom brothers sneered and scoffed—
Called it a honky rag.

For what, I wonder, did this lad die?
 For what his early grave?
Poor Calvin. He did not even have
An English Queen to save.

I hope the chaplains are correct:
That undone is Adam’s Fall,
Since the sum of Calvin’s life seems now
 Only letters on The Wall.</sup>
 

 

Circular Education
Amazed at all the quick information
I now can gain from electronic media,
In my old age I remember the blue-backed
Volumes of my boyhood’s encyclopedia.
 
Each bought weekly for carefully saved pennies
Through a supermarket’s promotional scheme,
Those cheaply printed books were my source
For facts, surely, but also many a dream.
 
No Britannica with elegant onionskin pages
And certainly riddled with errors, in those
I was first taught that knowledge can be netted
And held in alphabetized cages of prose.
 
On shelves of pine my father assembled
They sat, badly illustrated, poorly bound,
Where I learned that the world, when questioned,
Has places in it where answers are found.
 
I know by now those books are papery dust
As I am soon no doubt destined to be.
Still, I share yet their futile ambition:
To categorize the truth from A to Z.


Addicted
I open a box marked Winston
And extract a tube of death—
Another one for shortening
My allotted store of breath.
 
It was an Englishman named Raleigh
Who brought tobacco back
And taught all the world the way
Of dying pack by pack.

I keep persisting like a fool,
Drawing smoke across my tongue,
Ignoring what is happening--
The blackening of each lung.
 
I know one day that I will quit
This habit and this sin:
The day my body’s finally done
With pulling air within.


Co-Evolution
On his way up to civilization
Homo sapiens guessed that dogs and cats
Might be useful in keeping his stored-up grain
Relatively clear of mice and rats.
 
The dogs and cats on their own way
To civilization shrewdly had a hunch
That this semi-hairless sap on two legs
Could be the source of a free and endless lunch.


Dick Corey
He did what?  Shot himself?
Put a bullet through his head?
You’re serious? Certain about that?
Jee-zuss! Dick Corey dead!

Sure, I knew him. Went to Harvard
With him, Class of Oh-Three.
Oh, shit. Maybe he found out
About his wife and me.


Fashion Statement
Did Lazarus, one of the world’s
Few resurrected men,
Have a wife who went into widowhood
And came right out again?
 
And did she turn and rail at him,
“What the hell are you doing back--
I’ve come to like having people say
How good I look in black.”?

 

 

 

Indoctrinated
Parochially schooled
I learned to read
And write and spell
 
But also the Four Last
Things: Death, Judgment,
Heaven, and Hell.
 
The further on in life
I go the less
I am surprised.
 
Strangely the world makes sense
For those who’ve been
Well-catechized.


My Fellow Pennsylvanian Upriver
Reading a few Wallace Stevens poems
A sense of warm admiration upwelled:
The only poet in the American Canon
Who knew how Schuylkill is spelled.
 
But then I thought of Williams and Pound,
Undergrads together at Penn.
Surely they both had crossed that river
Going downtown now and again.

Yet neither ever published that magic word
In verse whether formal or free,
And so I keep in my heart a spot for him
Who spelled Schuylkill right for me.


Short to Second to First
Joe Tinker just shook his head and muttered.
Johnny Evers stayed, as usual, mum.
Frank Chance, though, kicked dirt and angrily cursed.
 “What a lousy asswipe bunch of pitchers!
Every friggin’ time I turn and look around,
I see a goddamned runner on at first.”
 
Meanwhile Harry Steinfeldt over at third
Whose name was never in a verse before
Put his glove to mouth and covered a yawn.
 Harry, a journeyman, knowing his place,
Did just what the Cubbies paid him to do:
Chewing tobacco, he looked calmly on.


The Old Formalist
Gives Advice
To a Young Apprentice
Write and do not worry
If what you’re making
Merits the name of art.
 
The man who is truly deaf
Does not hear at all
His own body’s fart.

 
Thought on One End of a Leash
On a Cold Rainy Night
I’ve learned that in America cats as pets
Outnumber dogs by three to one.
I think that this disparity has arisen because
Walking a dog is no goddamned fun.


Trophy Wives
Sleek long-leggèd women pass me —and I sigh—
Walking with men far wealthier than I.
Wealthier, really? How do you know?
It is with the really rich only such women go

Chasing the Long Ball
We are all outfielders on the run
Across the green grass, looking back,
Hoping to hear our cleated feet
Crunch in time on the warning track.

At Walter Reed
When you list all those who profit
From war and war’s loud alarms
Be sure to include the providers
Of prosthetic legs and arms.

At Ford's Theater
Consider the poor cast:
Not one curtain call
The night that John Booth
Upstaged them all.

Climate Change
The adolescent male has scientific evidence
Of global warming:
The perfection of a push-up bra doing
Its global forming.

Coffee Spooner
One night I heard myself slurring
The veritas that is in vino,
So I tried to sober myself up
With a cap of cuppacino.

Freudian
There is always a hidden meaning
In the things that parents do.
They are teaching their babies death
When they play at peek-a-boo.

Lady Luck
I sat across the table from her,
My chin upon my fist.
She had a Rolex on her mind.
I had a Timex on my wrist.

Happy Accident
Think of the prehistoric potter
And her thumb’s inadvertent slip.
Thanks to her all of us following folk
Have pitchers with a pouring lip.

Mission
This is the destiny of Eve’s
Every last son or daughter:
To be sent out with a sieve
Commanded to gather water.

Political Advice
Stand neither to the left nor right.
Stay firmly in the middle.
Note how Rome is always burning.
Learn to play the fiddle. 

 

Furor Scribendi
I waste paper,
I waste ink,
Just to see just
What I think.


Insecticide
"Cleanliness was rudimentary; one of the highest
paid members of the hospital (Guy's) staff was
the bug-catcher."
        --John Keats, The Making of a Poet, Aileen Ward
'Ere's me bucket, Mr. Keats. See wot a good day I've 'ad:
Nineteen roaches, big around as yer thumb in size,
Forty beetles, an', Lord luv us, two hundred and ten
Of the very worst of all--them fuckin' pesky flies.


A Cold Dish
Ms. Ruth Lilly left a fortune
To a poetry magazine
In the hallowed pages of which
No verse of hers was ever seen.

Year after year from Chicago
To Indiana rejections came.
Still, Ms. Lilly wrote on and on
While lesser poets tasted fame.

Dejected, did she weep and wipe
Tears away with Kleenex tissue?
No. She cracked the whip of her will.
Now her name's in every issue.


The Old Formalist at a Picnic
Eating little, he drank a lot of warm wine.
It affected his speech, his use of words.
Eventually he saw in a nearby meadow
Nothing but hummingflies and butterbirds.


Six Characters in Search of an Author
Juliet and Romeo
In their balcony scene
Othello being jealous
Iago cunningly mean
Hamlet in his castle
Lear upon the heath--
Always William Shakespeare
Lurking underneath.


The Miracle of Paper
With it we can safely preserve
The thoughts of great minds,
And also, more importantly,
Cleanse our bare behinds.


Consciousness
A mystery that will always be
Forever and forever unknown:
How did mind arise in such a bag
Of meat, blood, gristle, and bone?


Sligo Verse
Not sure, they took some bones
And sank them in Sligo ground.
Auden put them in a poem,
Pleased with its rhyming sound.

For all we know the bones
Irish gravel and dirt cover
Are those of some French villager
Murdered by his wife's lover.

No matter. The poet said to lie
Under an admonishing stone
Had he been live and told of it
Would have made the tale his own.

To a Young Artist
Grab your hard hat.
Fill your lunch pail.
Heed what I say
And you won't be sorry.

Report for work.
Punch the time clock
At The Sisyphus
Company's quarry.


Pillow Talk: The Poets
Don't tell me that the early love
Of Ted and Sylvia wasn't wonky.
One of his nicknames for her was
Kish-Pish-Ponky.


Imminent Foreclosure
Young I chose to live in a tower.
Yes, of ivory was it made.
Old I learn there's a mortgage on it
And, yes, it must be paid.


Housebreaking
The great poet does a thing that only
Rarely can be done if ever in prose:
He weaves a rug that you yourself will stain
And then in it he rubs your nose.


Kodak Moment
When George Eastman thought to put
Imaging in the hands of Everyman
He could never have known

That one day that same Everyman
Could carry around in his pocket
A camera in a phone.


Eternal Question
Macrobius wrote it down
In lingua Latina:
Ovumne prius fuerit
Aut gallina?

Though a translation you may
Neither need nor beg,
Here it is: what came first,
The chicken or the egg?

On Having Been Astonished
How often in my life--
More times than can be tracked--
Has my gast been flabbered
And my gob been smacked.


Penmanship
Disdaining the privilege of carelessness
That my age has brought me
I keep aware of all the great and little truths
That the good Sisters once taught me,

So that even on grocery lists and the like--
Say, all my notebook jottings--
I am always painstaking about crossing t's
And punctilious with i-dottings.


National Geographic
Achievement of maturity in the male
Of the species can be truly measured:
It occurs when one, sufficiently sexed,
Ceases searching for color photographs
Of the female breast, calmly turns each page,
And begins to read the magazine's text.


On Critics
I learned as an infant
At Philadelphia's Victorian Zoo
That apes and humans
Are members of a kindred species.

As a child I was told
That the great gorilla Bamboo
Once tried to pelt me
With clumps of his own feces.


Natural Selection
Thinking a lot about genetics and Darwin
Has raised for me questions like these:
Did millions of mothering mice avoid mousetraps?
And did they breed babies indifferent to cheese?

Post Vatican II
They're all gone now.
They're lost in the past.
Fish on Fridays
And the Eucharistic Fast.


Honesty in Government
In 1985 they altered the title
To Poet Laureate
From Consultant in Poetry
To the Library of Congress.
Re-naming made no difference.
The same bad legislation resulted.

Congress made the change
Because after much research
It was learned that in all
The nearly fifty previous years
Not a single poet by a Member
Had even once ever been consulted.


Possibly the World's Shortest Te Deum
I said, "God forbid."
And He did.


Platonism
Consider the Unity of the Canine Condition,
All sharing a similar supposition,
From the greatest of Danes to the tniest pug:
The Idea of a Perfectly Unpissed-Upon Fire Plug.


On the Hymns
of Sunday Morning
Out of all churches
Called Christian
Steepled or storefront
Throughout America
With all of their
Squabbling
Contentious
Obstinate and
Contradictory
Theological views

I think God
Chooses to listen
Mostly to Southern
Black Baptist ones
Since God's wide
Creation, I've noted,
Is filled mainly
With two things.
One is Rhythm and
The other is Blues.

On Having a Fellow Poet to Send Stuff To
Think of Shakespeare, finishing a scene
And laying aside his pen,
Saying to himself, "That's one I'll have to
Make sure I show to Ben."


Punctuation
How great an invention is the comma,
The purpose of which is chiefly
To make us pause and think,
Even if ever so briefly.


As Time Goes By
The poor makers of clocks and watches
Are slowly losing their power.
More and more people are checking cellphones
To determine the hour.


At Walgreen's
Illness and injury are good for some in this world.
They are the source of profit for the healing trades.
Think of all the aspirin sold by Bayer
And Johnson & Johnson's bandaging aids.


The Old Formalist Needs Love, Too
Nightly I see TV commercials for services
Aimed at mixing, matching, and mating
And wonder why for the very, very old,
There isn't a site called Carbon Dating.


Curdled Thought
Many mornings I am reminded
Of the acidic state of my soul:
More than once I have unknowingly poured
Sour milk into my cereal bowl.

In the Locker Room
A thought came to me the other day
(As usual it was metered)--
More than one man is appalled
At the way that he's appetered.


Verba Sat Sap
Cliches are clichés because they are true.
There can be little doubt about that.
There is a barrel whose bottom we scrape
And a bag out of which we let the cat.

Anti-Theft
My father lived in a time when men wore hats.
In places like bars they hung with others on a rack.
Carefully in India ink on the inner band he'd printed
In neat upper case, "LIKE HELL IT'S YOURS PUT IT BACK."
His message truly worked, I cannot doubt it.
I never even once saw him come home without it.

Unclipped
I have a sure measure of time.
Unlike my watch, it never fails.
It is the accumulation of grime
Under the edges of my nails.

Oh, No
One's modern life is filled
With many a minor fright:
I looked down and saw
A lit CHECK ENGINE light.

Recent

Mahogany Row Conversation
Said Mr. Rolls to Mr. Royce,
"We are compelled to make
A critical marketing choice."

Said Mr. Royce to Mr. Rolls,
"We'll build limousines for the King
And the wealthiest of souls."

Said Mr. Rolls to Mr. Royce,
"A demographic extremely small.
You've not been thinking evidently."

Said Mr. Royce to Mr. Rolls,
"Oh, God damn it all to bloody hell--
Offer the less well-off the Bentley!"

St. Peter Speaks of Modern Physics
to Sir Isaac Newton
Ike, old boy, I've got some bad news.
I tried to keep it from you,
But I can no longer hide it.

You know that famous apple of yours?
Now they're going around and saying
There's gravity inside it.

Olfactory
Poets in the days that Miniver Cheevy dreamed about
Wrote often of the sweet odors that gardens embowered.
It is well for us to remember that the loves of those poets
And they themselves seldom bathed and never showered.